Character Traits: Describing What a Character is Like

Character Traits in a Description – Introduction

When writing a story, authors develop the character’s personality through the character’s thoughts, dialogue and actions. By identifying and examining these three things, we can describe the character traits of a character. Let’s look at the definition of character traits:

Knowing how to identify character traits is important both when we are reading the text, and writing a narrative text. Character traits also come into play when you want to write a description of a character.

Character Traits in a Description – Strategy

You can use adjectives like brave, worried or excited to describe a character, but authors also use dialogue and thoughts to show what the character is feeling or thinking. They also add actions and body language to give the reader clues about the character's emotions. When analysing the character’s reactions or emotions in a particular situation, we get clues about their character traits.

For example, to show that the character is scared, the author can write: Shaking, Taylor walked up to the rollercoaster, whispering to himself, “I can do it! I can do it!”

We know that the character is feeling scared because he is shaking and whispering to himself. The character trait that we identify in Taylor is fear or anxiety.

When writing your own character description or doing character analysis, you can use this character description template:

Use this template to write down the thoughts, dialogue and actions of the character to identify their traits.

Finding Character Traits – Examples

Let’s take a look at the passage about Olivia, a girl who is making a birthday present for her friend, and see what we can learn about how she is feeling:

Now we will look at actions, dialogue and thoughts to understand how Olivia is feeling. Let’s use the character description template:

In the beginning of the passage, Olivia is seen scratching her head. This action shows us that she is feeling confused and is thinking really hard about the present. In the dialogue between Olivia and her mum about Jamie, Olivia appears very thoughtful, caring and concerned about Jaime’s feelings. When Olivia thinks that she knew she would come up with a great idea, we can see that she feels confident. The character traits we can identify in Olivia are that she is thoughtful, empathetic, creative, determined and confident in her skills.

Character Traits – Summary

Let’s summarise what we have learnt about character traits.

Now you know how to identify character traits! To learn even more about characters, watch our video on understanding characters from actions and dialogue..

Frequently Asked Questions about Character Traits